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January 12, 2005

Kleiman, JÃ¼nger, endives

Like Diogenes looking for an honest man, Mark Kleiman has been looking for a modern non-genre pro-war novel of high literary merit. He has had a surprisinglydifficulttime.
Because I am nuts, I suggested Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. Most people don't think of World War One as a positive transformative experience. Jünger had no such doubts:

"Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and flame, we could go into life as though from the anvil; into friendship, love, politics, professions, into all that destiny had in store. It is not every generation that is so favored."

Jünger was born in 1895, and lived nearly to his one hundred and third birthday. He had, um, an interesting life.
Recently the New York City Math Teacher (Now Past the Cusp of Matrimony) and I went to Zum Stammtisch Restaurant, somewhere off the Long Island Expressway. Even though my German ancestors left around 1848, and NYCMT's some ninety years later, the food still calls to us at a primeval, almost genetic level. And so over sauerbraten and smoked trout and rye bread and dark beer (all delicious) we fell to talking about the vagaries of German history; and for some reason, I brought up Jünger.
"Ah, Jünger," said NYCMT. "The lich."
'Lich' is rather an uncommon word in English. I'd only ever heard the word spoken before in two contexts: among people familiar with the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, as a kind of dead man walking; and to refer to then living nonagenarian senator Strom Thurmond. It derives from an Old English word meaning 'corpse'. Cognates are wonderful things.
So Jünger has been a little difficult to rehabilitate. In any case, he's not very well known in English (as Kleiman notes), although he's been championed by figures as diverse as the British aesthete and travel writer Bruce Chatwin and the Texan cyber-guru Bruce Sterling. For the Jünger neophyte, here's a short piece taken from the 1937 edition of his Adventurous Heart, called "Violet Endives".

I stepped into a luxurious gourmet shop because I had noticed in the display window a quite uniquely violet sort of endive. I wasn't surprised when the salesman explained to me that the only kind of meat with which this dish could be served is human flesh -- I had already rather dimly suspected that.
We had a long talk about the manner of preparation, then we went down into the cold-storage chamber where I saw people hanging on the wall like rabbits in front of a meat merchant's shop. The salesman made it a special point that here and without exception I got my prey and did not even consider the pieces crammed into rows at the breeding establishments: "leaner, but -- I'm not saying it to boast -- far more aromatic." Hands, feet, and heads were set out in particular dishes and planted with little price labels.
As we were going back up the stairs, I remarked: "I didn't realize the civilization in this city has already advanced so far," whereupon the salesman seemed to hesitate for a moment, so as then to give me a receipt with a very obliging smile.

Oh, don't get me wrong - Jünger is a marvelous stylist. His forcefulness and clarity, and his unearthly knack for rendering horror as heroic halo, make him a singular creature. Which one would that be?
Jünger is the German fascist lyricist.
He's the fun, exciting, readable fascist - he doesn't sound like that guy at the bar with the canned rant you can hear by sticking in a nickel. Jünger isn't a nut, either - he lacks single-spaced, McElwainian crackpottery, and he's missing the quality of the skeezy lunatic uncle with attic full of porn and racist men's magazines.

Bernard, while Eridanos published some translations of Jünger a few years back, the only book that now seems to be widely available in the US other than Storm of Steel is the New York Review of Books edition of The Glass Bees, the heartwarming story of an ex-mercenary with trouble paying the bills who goes to work for an Italian robotics magnate. Wackiness, as they say, ensues.

It was first published in the 1950s, Jünger's LSD decade.

NYCMT, I'm not disagreeing. Jünger's prose is crystalline, icy; like an electron micrograph of the carapaces of the beetles he so adored. There's no comparison between it and, say, Pound's, or Wyndham Lewis's (like going to the dentist, as someone once said about Franco), or even Marinetti's, with whom he shows some affinities.

"The Glass Bees", eh? Oh, FYI, I saw "The Years of Rice and Salt" at the library and couldn't help myself. The verdict so far: Hey, it turns out I think government is good for something after all! Risk-pooling....